This week we spent some time looking into the future with the Droid DNA's impossibly high-res screen, and some time look into the past and examining the Internet's humble, awful looking roots. We've also got the mad ravings of John McAfee, a glance at American politics, wacky safety videos, errant planets, weird Chinese buildings and more. Check it all out below.

This is the real political map of the United States of America after the presidential election. A fascinating view, much different from the maps you saw that night, which showed an artificial, binary divide. But these maps demonstrate that there is not such a huge gap between rural and urban America. More »

Do you know that Altavista, the omnipotent web search platform before Google awakened, is still online? Okay, it's integrated into Yahoo, but the domain and the interface is up and running. Just like HotBot! Anyone remember HotBot? And Lycos? WebCrawler? More »

Not happy with building mysterious gigantic structures in the desert, the Chinese are now building inter-dimensional portals in the middle of their cities. What the hell is this 515-foot (157 meters) high metal structure in the the city of Fushun, in northeast China's Liaoning province? More »

The iPhone 5 is pretty good, and for most folks, its Wi-Fi is actually very good. It was in our tests. But a lot of people have been reporting in that the Wi-Fi is actually awful, and can't hold a signal at all. This should fix that right up for you. More »

We just got our hands on the HTC Droid DNA this morning, and our first impressions were very promising. The screen is really, really gorgeous. But, how gorgeous is it when you put it next to the other best smartphones? More »

This bright blue marble is CFBDSIR2149. Located only 100 light-years away from Earth, this lonely cyan gem may be the very first errant planet detected by humans. And apparently it's quite beautiful, looking similar to Neptune* while being four to seven times as big as Jupiter. More »

In September of this year, McAfee published a diary in three parts of his recent "adventures" in Belize on a private message board, where he described how his life had been transformed-and according to McAfee, threatened-over the last two years by corruption in government both local and national, as well as his taking on of a personal harem of local women. One woman, "Amber Smith," according to McAfee, was an assassin. He called the story "Darkness Falls." More »

The HTC One X, the EVO 4G LTE, and the One X+ are among our favorite phones. But the company hasn't had a flagship device for Verizon in a long time. Now, with the Droid DNA, HTC decided to go all out and make the most impressively spec-filled smartphone the world has yet known. More »

These days filmmakers often turn to computer graphics for scenes of destruction that would otherwise be too expensive or dangerous to stage in real life. But Skyfall posed a different problem. Namely that the effects crew didn't want to damage a priceless 1960 Aston Martin DB 5 that appeared in the original Bond film 50 years ago. More »